Meeting of the Parliament 24 March 2026 [Draft]
I hope that it is okay that I borrow a minute from my colleague.
In the run-up to the 2016 election, I worked on a member’s bill to introduce a transient visitor levy. I knew that it would make a difference in Edinburgh by helping to address the challenges and opportunities created by year‑round tourism, which puts pressure on culture, housing and local services. However, democracy kicked in and I did not get elected, so I was delighted to support the 2024 TVL, because it was urgently needed. However, as Mark Griffin commented, only two years later we are back here supporting another TVL bill to address issues that were not fixed in that bill.
Details matter, and I believe that we urgently need a new Scottish Government that is ready to fix the systemic issues that our country faces. In our national health service, we have overcrowded accident and emergency facilities, inadequate mental health support for children, which will impact their lives, and appalling waiting times for adults. One constituent I have been supporting has been told that it will be a decade before he gets the help that he urgently needs.
It has been a privilege to serve the constituents of Edinburgh Central and then the Lothians. That has included local campaigning on issues such as the Dalry baths and a new eye pavilion, as well as the current campaign to save Marionville fire station. I have been endlessly raising Edinburgh’s housing emergency, and I have been highlighting the systemic underfunding of NHS Lothian.
Referring to what Ariane Burgess said, I have also been campaigning on the need to urgently address our climate and nature emergencies and to create decent jobs and empower local communities at the same time. For me, being in here is about delivering change that will benefit my constituents. That is why I stood to get elected in 1999, for the first session of the Parliament. It was personal. My dad chaired the all-party campaign for a Scottish assembly for a decade in his spare time, and my granny was a Labour activist after the second world war. You can imagine the debates in our family—they never stopped.
If someone had told me that I would get elected in 1999, that I would be involved in the coalition negotiations and that I would then become a member of Donald Dewar’s Cabinet, I really would not have believed it. That taught me that constructive hard work and using the powers of our Parliament could deliver real change. For me, it was about investing in our railways—Airdrie to Bathgate, Larkhall to Milngavie and Stirling to Alloa, and supporting work on the Borders railway—as well as new CalMac ferries, improving island airports and tackling potholes. I had a £30 million fund. That would probably not sort out Edinburgh these days, and that was for the whole country. I introduced twenty’s plenty zones, investment in walking and cycling infrastructure and our first national planning framework. I set a target—which was quite radical at the time—of 20 per cent of electricity consumed coming from renewables.
I delivered legislation to establish our first national parks: Loch Lomond and the Trossachs and the Cairngorms. As a former town planner in Central Regional Council, I was hugely proud of that. My first debate in here was on Loch Lomond and the Trossachs national park, responding to Jackie Baillie’s members’ business debate. It is an issue that we have both been passionate about for decades.
It is harder to deliver change in opposition, but it is a matter of giving a voice to effective campaigning by constituents, such as on the eye pavilion. It can deliver, even if it takes years to get the result that we need.
I was very proud to amend housing legislation to support constituents who were attempting to make tenement repairs. It is now more straightforward for them to do that. In the next session, the Parliament will have to work out how to address community heat networks and the installing of solar panels, which are urgently needed on our tenements.
In 2009, I successfully amended the Climate Change (Scotland) Bill to include a requirement for all new homes to have whatever renewables were appropriate installed in order to make them more energy efficient. I thank the then finance minister for that—and members can work out afterwards who that is.
We are now at a point where we need to accelerate action to address our climate and nature emergencies. We urgently need to get our constituents and businesses the support that they require now. Great British Energy and the United Kingdom’s warm homes plan show the way forward, but the 400,000 homes and buildings in Scotland that are currently at risk from flooding do not need warm words; they urgently need action. People are calling out for transformative change—well-paid, decent jobs in every constituency across the country and community, council and co-operatively owned heat networks and power schemes.
It has been an honour to serve in this Parliament and to work with MSPs across the chamber. I have had a great team of staff throughout the years, and I thank them for all their hard work. I also thank all the activists and community members I have worked with and campaigned with. It has been a real privilege.